Models of the History of Philosophy: Volume II: From Cartesian Age to Brucker

Giovanni Santinello · Gregorio Piaia

Ara 2010 · International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées Kitap 204 · Springer Science & Business Media

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Published in English for the first time, this is the translation of "Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker", the second installment of the monumental multi-volume "Storia delle storie generali della filosofia". It follows on from the first volume, translated from the Italian by C.W.T. Blackwell and published by Kluwer in 1993, which covered the subject from its origins in the Renaissance to the Historia Philosophica. This volume guides the reader from the Cartesian rejection of the ‘philosophical past’ that found voice in the work of Malebranche, right up to the establishment of a ‘critical’ history of philosophy by 18th century thinkers A.-F Boureau-Deslandes and J.J. Brucker. The latter pair investigated philosophy from its most ancient origins up to the work of their own contemporaries, and in doing so acted as midwives to the birth of the history of philosophy into a genre in its own right. It was a shift in emphasis that spawned dozens of works of critical history which in turn made an immense contribution to the culture of the Enlightenment. Through careful analysis of more than 36 separate works, the authors show how in the span of a single century the theoretical and methodological techniques used to assess the history of philosophy were refined and developed. The period marks the vital transition from a so-called ‘erudite’ historiography to a ‘critical’ or ‘philosophical’ history of philosophy, embodied by Bayle and Heumann respectively. The works examined in detail are either general histories of philosophy, or texts—such as Bayle’s Dictionnaire—which have strongly influenced the development of the genre.

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GIOVANNI SANTINELLO (1922-2003) was full professor of the History of Philosophy in the Faculty of Education at the University of Padua, a member of the Accademia Galileiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padua, the Director of the Institute for the History of Philosophy, and was awarded a Gold Medal for Merit in Education, Culture, and the Arts by the Ministry of Education. A pupil of Luigi Stefanini, in the course of his research he applied philosophical personalism to the field of historiography in the following areas: a) the ethical, religious, and aesthetic thought of the Renaissance (Nicolas of Kues, Leon Battista Alberti, Léfèvre d'Etaples, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More, Luigi Pesaro, Paolo Sarpi...); b) metaphysics and criticism in Immanuel Kant; and c) the history and theory of philosophical historiography in the modern and contemporary period.

GREGORIO PIAIA (1944) is full professor of the History of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Padua. He has been vice-president of the Italian Philosophical Society, and is a member of the Accademia Galileiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padua and the Ateneo of Treviso. He is currently Director of the Philosophy Department. His research has developed in three directions: a) political, ethical and religious thought in the late medieval and renaissance period (Marsilio da Padova, Nicolò da Cusa, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More...); b) the history and theory of philosophical historiography from the medieval period to the 20th century; and c) the philosophical culture of the Veneto in the 18th and 19th centuries.